RERUN (2009.11.12)
By Carmen Piekenbrock
Dedicated to el Doctor F. Sanchez y Escribano, a teacher, un profesor, without equal, whose genius and integrity taught me so much, and who, now deceased, should not be blamed for any errors I make.
“No hay nada nuevo en el mundo” is an old Spanish saying. “There is nothing new in the world.” It seems all too true if you know what happened to Spain and you study the present state of affairs in the United States. We are following the same evolution of beliefs and actions as Spain went through, moving from the Renaissance to the Baroque, even though she operated within a religion, Christianity, and we are operating within a form of government, Democracy. I know, some will remind me that the United States was founded as a republic with a representative form of democracy, but this difference is part of the evolution. The issue of whether Spain was more a Catholic than a Christian nation was equally part of her evolution. And even though the United States has the tradition of the separation of church and state, we still have religious roots, singing “As Christ died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
The Spaniards taught me, at the University of Madrid in “El Curso Para Extranjeros”, in the summer of 1963 that Spain was the first modern nation. Prior to France, Italy, and Germany, to name some, she combined what are today provinces of Spain under one government, by way of the union of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, los Reyes Católicos. The instructors at the University of Madrid emphasized also that the same year in which this union was achieved, 1492, Columbus discovered the New World financed by los Reyes Católicos, and a dictionary of Spanish as a modern language was published, two more “firsts”. One of the strategic reasons Los Reyes Católicos achieved a political union was their stand against the privileges of the nobles, as defined during the Middle Ages, even though they did not sign a Magna Carta as was done in England. In fact, so successful was this period in and for Spain that the instructors at the University of Madrid had a difficult time beginning with the fact that the Italians started the Renaissance. It is also obvious that between Spain’s supremacy and ours was the supremacy of England, but the parallels between Spain and the United States are strikingly numerous, and saying this is not to deny the parallels that there are with Rome and England as well.
During the Renaissance, Spain came to control Western Europe, her later King Charles I also being Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, and conquered much of the New World. Her goal to Christianize the New World was supported by imitation, even if the rest of Europe would say they were more humane, and even though today we hear far more about the abuses than the goals, and far more about the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel than about her previous victories. The victory which accompanied the forming of a nation under los Reyes Católicos was the end of a war of hundreds of years, from 711 to 1492, to oust the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula (which includes Portugal). So Spain achieved geographical unity, political unity, religious unity, and in a sense linguistic unity even as she supported Columbus in his efforts to find a sea route around the world.
Even though Spain’s war against the Moors was prior to her achieving political unity and the wars of the United States with the Indians, as settlers moved west, was mostly after the thirteen Colonies signed onto the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, both countries experienced a period during which there was a frontier, a frontier that involved a clash of cultures as well as the occupation of territory. There is another difference, a big one. The Moors had invaded Spain during the collapse of the Roman Empire, so that the kingdoms of Spain was re-conquering, in fact it is called La Reconquista, what they considered to be their territory. The frontier of North America, on the other hand, was settlers driving the original inhabitants out of their territories. But the clash of cultures in both cases was dramatic, involving many stories, some about betrayal and cruelty, some about friendship and honor.
The religious crisis caused in Europe by the Protestants, “les protestants” the French word for “protestors”, began most noticeably with the posting by Martin Luther of his Ninety-five Theses in 1517. The Reformation produced a strong reaction in Spain. She was committed religiously to the beliefs of the Renaissance, believing in free will and in salvation as dependent upon what a man did during his life. If a man achieved fame by the standards of a Christian nation, then he would be in God’s heaven. The Protestants countered with the concept of predestination, making salvation possible only by the grace of God.
At the root of the political crisis of the Twentieth Century were the Communists, who countered the freedom and capitalism of the United States with community ownership and control. Karl Marx published what is commonly known as The Communist Manifesto in 1848. George Kennan, former U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, said in an interview I heard in the 1970s’ that the Russians did not believe in the possibility of objectively determining reality nor in an objective determination being possible of what is right and wrong, providing insight into the degree to which the communists disagree(d) with the general beliefs of the United States. In the United States, a man strove to use his freedom to become wealthy, or at least to have a “better life”, and/or to do good. This could lead to being famous as well, recalling the “fame” sought by Christian missionaries and conquerors, the most famous conquistadores being Pizarro and Cortes, in the 15th and 16th centuries. The communists of the twentieth century changed the definition of “equality”, originally meaning “equal before the law”, by moving it into the economic realm in order to take wealth away from those who achieve(d) it.
“Baroque” is a term usually applied to literature, painting, sculpture, even architecture. The word “baroque” itself comes from one of the nonsense words used in medieval syllogisms. The first use of it was to imply that the art was nonsense, or “unclear”. This “style” began in Italy, as had the Renaissance, but Spain eventually followed, as had the rest of Europe. Along with its more dynamic presentation, the Baroque style also reflected Europe’s loss of certainty of purpose caused by the battle over religious beliefs, and Spain also suffered an economic collapse, the riches brought back from the New World having caused inflation and excesses. Laws were passed as described in memoirs like the following:
“…coaches are reduced to four horses and they can only have women in them, with children and relatives; they cannot be loaned to anyone, and no man [alone] can ride in a coach without having a license…the reason being for taking them away is that men are becoming effeminate riding in them, and so it is believed that licenses will be difficult to obtain.”
I remember el doctor Escribano saying too that there were traffic jams because of the quantity of “coaches”, and that they passed a law to limit the width of the starched circular necks on women’s dresses in order to assure they did not cut other people on the dance floor.
I believe the United States is headed for another serious economic collapse, because the process of taking wealth from those who create it ultimately leads to “capitalism” (The U. S. has not been a capitalist country in the true meaning of that word for decades.) being “sacked” (to echo the sacking of Rome) by the liberals (socialists), whose one saving virtue is that they generally follow a less violent path than do the communists to gain the power they need to re-distribute the wealth. (An economic crisis is even more likely if the environmentalists also prevent the United States from growing its economy.)
The Renaissance and Baroque drama of Spain have been compared in a book entitled Wolfflin’s Principles in Spanish Drama 1500-1700, by Darnell H. Roaten and F. Sánchez y Escribano. To summarize Wolfflin’s Principles, a Spanish Renaissance drama, or play,
is linear (only one plot)
has plane organization (“time is arranged in a number of scenes” that are “in succession” and “proceed steadily to the clearly anticipated ending”)
has closed form (“logical development is deliberately sought”)
has relative unity (“every scene stands out from its neighbors in time”, but “all are held together by the central motive”)
has absolute clarity (“plots and characters are reduced to a minimum”)
A Spanish Baroque drama on the other hand
is painterly (two to several plots “fuse and are interwoven”, with the plots and subplots “characterized by restless and continuous movement and by contrast”)
has recession of time (“incidents are united into plots which steadily merge with each other as if they were aiming at one principal idea”)
has open form (“an obviously logical development is avoided”, “seemingly distractive elements are introduced”, and “the central theme is kept from seeming the most important until near or at the end”)
has absolute unity (in spite of the distractions, a single “motive” dominates “strongly”)
has relative unclearness (“more characters and plots than are strictly necessary for the development of the chief motive…obscures the clarity”)
I am going to use our television programs and movies (the motion picture being the newest of the “fine arts” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1974) for comparisons. These are not as different from Spanish drama as you might think, especially since religious themes, not typical of our “drama”, remained strong in Spain.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, Macropedia Volume 18, page 224, copyrighted 1974, states:
“During the second half of the 16th century professional troupes had been established in Spain and England. These troupes did not perform for one particular social class; members of high society attended professional performances in the Spanish corrales (courtyards)…. Professional troupes were specially hired to act at court on certain occasions.” It is also noted, in this section of the Encyclopedia, that the second character and/or plot of the servant, as squire Sancho Panza was to Don Quijote, who had experiences on his (peasant) level while his master had his (hildago/nobleman) experiences, was well developed in Spanish drama. It is interesting to note in passing that the Spaniards describe “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha”, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra as the first modern novel.
Another “early form” of novel, to quote The Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia Volume VII, page 987, is the picaresque novel, and it “originated in Spain” in 1554 with the publication of “Lazarillo de Tormes”. The pícaro is a rogue “who drifts, in his effort to survive, from place to place and from one social milieu to another. In its episodic structure the picaresque novel resembles the long, rambling romances of chivalry…. Unlike the idealistic knight-errant hero, the picaroon hero is cynical, …and the ends he serves are his own. Though amoral, he is not a villain.” In the novel La Pícara Justina, in1605, “…a woman picaroon deceives lovers as the pícaro does masters.” To further quote the Encyclopedia Britannica, “In the mid-18th century, the growth of the dramatic realistic novel with its tight sequence of cause and effect and its greater development of character brought the decline of the picaresque,….” Still quoting, “In comparison to the new [dramatic realistic] novel, its [the picaresque novel’s] chronological structure seemed primitive, and it lacked any unifying principle other than its central character, who…never changed. It was also found lacking in moral insight and probability. The picaroon’s fortunes might rise or fall, but it was by chance…, and he was as likely to be booted or beaten for an honest deed as he was to profit by a false trick.”
These quotes should resonate for the reader with the information being presented here, although they also demonstrate that the evolution from “Renaissance” to “Baroque” is not strictly tied to the “birth” and “death” of nations. This evolution is also tied to all types of art. The best example from the culture of the United States is “movies”. Movies not only developed technologically, from black and white to color, and from silent to sound, but they also nearly started over the classical separation of comedy and tragedy, reflecting as well the great variety that had developed during the centuries in between. Early comedy was Laurel and Hardy (who made over 200 slapstick films in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s), and romance was Rudolph Valentino (who was considered the “Great Lover” in the 1920’s). Charlie Chaplin (who became the most famous actor of silent films according to the Encyclopedia Britannica and then wrote and directed feature-length films in the 1920’s and 30’s) mixed pathos with his humor and Rudolph Valentino mixed heroics with romance, so the separateness quickly melted away, but still an interesting phenomenon.
One of Spain’s most famous playwrights was Lope de Vega. He is credited with creating the Spanish play called a “comedia” and was very prolific, writing at least 500 plays, as well as poetry and other works. He wrote plays for income and was well known and popular with the Spanish public, admired for his “wit”, to use the word from the Encyclopedia Britannica. His plays are not as well crafted perhaps or as well known as those of Shakespeare, but there are a lot of them.
The tragicomedy, la tragicomedia, started by an Italian, was a “dramatic genre”, to quote The Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropaedia Volume X, page 85, “…that flourished… toward the end of the 16th century and into the first half of the 17th.” It is a “kind of play that was derived from Renaissance notions of Greek tragedy but was injected with romantic situations and given a happy ending.” One of the most famous Spanish works of the Renaissance is “La Celestina”, also known as the “Tragicomedia de Calixta y Melibea”, who are the equivalents of Sheakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and whose ideal romance is contrasted with Celestina providing sexual partners for the servants. The term “tragicomedy”, quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica, is sometimes used to describe “any play in which a seemingly tragic sequence of events has an unexpected happy outcome or at least ends without the final tragic fall of some person, order, or way of life.”
Interestingly, the Encyclopedia Britannica says that the popularity of the tragicomedy was related to the development of song, dance, and “spectacle”, and that in Italy where song was emphasized, it led to opera; and in France where dance was emphasized, it led to ballet. In the United States, the musical comedy is also, or at least has been, a major component of our entertainment.
In Spain during the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, a tragedy involved a “hero” who would go to hell and a comedy involved a “hero” who would go to heaven. In the Baroque period, many plays even had an added scene showing the ascension into heaven or the descent into hell. During the Baroque period, Don Juan, refusing to repent, descended to hell. As a character type, Don Juan first appeared in Spanish literature in “EL Burlador de Sevilla” in 1630.
After learning “Wofflin’s Principles”, I could not watch television or go to the movies without seeing them in every show, except for the news and talk shows, and in every movie. In extrapolating these principles to the greater diversity and freedom of these art forms in the United States, and also considering their relevance to our overall culture, I have come to think of the following lines of evolution:
From the Clear to the Unclear
From the Individual to the Group (or from Deeds to Words)
From Action to Violence (or from Laughter and Tears to Pain)
From Freedom to Force (or from Opportunity to Need)
From Believing to Pretending (or from Education to Indoctrination)
I must state that I have never had the time nor the money to make an organized study of the movies and television shows of the United States, and I don’t watch soap operas or horror films. Therefore, most of my examples of these lines of evolution reflect my taste, the circumstances of my life, and the period when I first noticed them, the 1960’s and 1970’s. I didn’t stop watching movies and television, needless to say, so therefore there are more recent examples as well, at least of the “Baroque style”.
For a quick introduction to this line of evolution, I’m going to summarize an example based upon two paintings that the Spaniards used to point out the differences between the Renaissance and the Baroque.
The Renaissance painting shows Mary holding the child Jesus. She is perfectly centered in the painting, and directly over her head is a geometric dome from which hangs an egg on a string. The egg symbolizes the union of heaven and earth. On each side of Mary are three men, the two nearest to her are the tallest and the two furthest from her are the shortest, creating a triangle of figures, with Mary at the pinnacle. All the figures face squarely forward and all the men are dressed identically.
The Baroque painting also shows Mary, but she is not in the center of the painting, only somewhat larger than the other figures. Many angels surround her, each one in a different position, winding and twisting among themselves and the clouds in seeming disorder. The earth is not shown. This implies the separation of heaven and earth. It is somewhat difficult even to keep one’s eyes on Mary within the tangle of angels. This second painting is more “realistic” and “dynamic”, but it lacks the clarity and certainty of the Renaissance painting.
If I think about a Renaissance “style” for the United States, I remember the Hopalong Cassidy shows on early television, each show having a single plot with scenes occurring in order along a straight line of time, with the ending a certainty. We knew who was going to win and very nearly how. His sidekick Gabby Hayes supplied the humor, making for some comedia.
To continue with westerns, I next think of the Bonanza series. It had more than one hero (Baroque), although sometimes one of them had a show to himself. It usually had only one plot per show (Renaissance), but how the winner was going to win was made more difficult to guess, and winning was often more difficult as well (Baroque). There were some distractions with secondary characters, like the cook.
The easiest Baroque hero to talk about is James Bond. James Bond movies are filled with many distractions (ah, yes), full of false leads and repeated crisis for the hero. And I believe you could argue that there is more than one hero, since without technology, such as his car, booby trapped shoes and pens, rocket equipped airplanes, and so forth, he could not win. But, even though there is the fight between “good” and “evil” in James Bond movies, lacking is the strong moral lesson that Baroque drama often has.
Another interesting element of the James Bond movies is the combining of the hero and the comic into the same character. James Bond’s humor is largely verbal, but the hero himself makes the jokes. Hoss Carwright, of Bonanza, foreshadows this mixture. In Spain’s dramas, the hero and the comic remained more separated, but the comedy progressively undermined the ideal to a greater and greater extent. For us too, the heroic can be nearly submerged by comedy, for example, Peter Sellers in “The Pink Panther” and Don Knotts on the “Andy Griffith Show”.
The final step is humor that isn’t really funny, satire and beyond. “Doctor Strangelove” is one of the more famous U. S. movies that ilustrates this. At the end of the movie, a man runs for his life even as a nuclear bomb drops from an airplane within sight. The tragedy is that he has no hope of escaping this instrument of destruction, yet there is humor in his attempt to do so, at least you laugh in spite of yourself.
More recently bodily functions have become common to increase the “yuk” which humor can contain. I am reminded of the Spanish picaresque novel “Lazarillo de Tormes”, in which Lázaro tells us in the first person about his “battles” with a blind master, mostly related to his master’s failure to feed him. When his blind master discovers that Lázaro has put a hole, which he keeps sealed with wax, in the bottom of the master’s wine cask, the master brings the wine cask down onto Lazaro’s face. When the master sniffs Lazaro’s mouth to verify that he has eaten a turnip, the master receives the turnip back in his face. And finally as he decides to leave the old blind man, Lázaro lines him up with a post when he wants to jump across a rivlet of water during a rain, so that the old man falls unconscious.
From the Individual to the Group (or From Deeds to Words)
In the United States, “popularity” is the standard of measurement for nearly everything, and it is reinforced by the “majority” rules of democracy and the power of the media and the marketplace. It can be said, then, that a story about someone becoming, or being, “somebody” is a comedy while a tragedy is someone becoming, or being, a “nobody”. And who decides whether an individual is “popular” or “somebody”? The group. The “group” comes in many forms, from families to schools to sports teams to clubs to states to the nation. The power of the group is a strategic component of “political correctness”, since the punishments, such as verbal and legal attacks (possibly to economic destruction), and the rewards, such as praise and selection for leadership, are delivered or controlled by the group.
If we go back in time to the movie “White Christmas”, we can glimpse a more Renaissance-like treatment of North American themes, even though somewhat Baroque elements are also present. This classic musical has the comic “sidekick” (Danny Kaye) to the hero (Bing Crosby), and each has his own romance. The hero’s romance is the one that contains the lesson of the main plot: the helping of an old friend. The hero is helping someone he knows to deserve help, and his helping his friend involves sacrifice but it does not involve physical danger. The issue for the hero’s girl friend (Rosemary Clooney) is whether he is helping his friend for unselfish reasons or for personal monetary gain. He can’t win the girl without being unselfish, and the resolution of this issue is quickly tied up with the ending of the movie, the climax of the Christmas show.
The “Daniel Boone” television show had some episodes that were remarkable for the Baroque elements they exhibited. In one episode Daniel Boone, his family and neighbors “save” a boy from bad behavior, which the boy considers justified because his father has been killed by Daniel Boone. During the show, the boy finally acknowledges the truth that his father was a thief and a murderer, and finds out that a surprise birthday party that he ruined was for him. He says “I’m sorry,” to the group and Daniel Boone’s son says “You know, I never did really like Luke until just now.” The boy is “saved” for the group by the group, even though the idea for the birthday party comes from one girl (the hint of a leader). I’ll even say that his birthday, as axiomatic to his being alive as is the soul to Christian salvation, was used by the group to honor him (the group’s “grace”?) even though he had not merited the honor by good behavior, and that his “repentance” achieves automatic “salvation”, just as it did in Spanish Baroque plays, no action is required other than saying “I’m sorry”.
There is a Baroque Spanish play in which an older man has done many wrongs, burning houses full of people and raping women, and he refused to repent time after time. Just before he is to be hung, his son talks him into repenting. He goes to heaven for only one reason, repentance at the last minute and he repents only because of his son’s request. In this same play, called “Condenado por Desconfiado” (Condemned for Lack of Faith), a moral priest who has been faithful his entire life is sent to hell because he has the lack of faith to ask God if he is going to heaven.
The above episode of the “Daniel Boone” show also had another element that is Baroque in style, an ending that is after the high point of the boy’s being “saved”. The ending ties up the loose ends, with more reversal of wrongdoing and more apologies, and adds some humor to the lesson. Luke’s reward was being walked back home by the group.
In another episode of this series, it was a cantankerous old man who repeatedly refused to understand which was the “good” side, and after he finally joins the “good” guys, there is a humorous house-building scene into which the old man returns. He has joined the “right” group.
Interestingly, the same season as the “Daniel Boone” episodes described above, the show “Jeannie” was entirely humorous and contained no object lessons that I ever saw at least. It didn’t even comment on the space program. It was entirely for entertainment. The patterns of the “Daniel Boone” show, however, have come to be a public political process, in which asking for and giving apologies is common.
In recent years, a new dramatic element has emerged which demonstrates the importance of the individual voluntarily sacrificing for the group, or for its leader(s). The most striking example of the Christ-like sacrifice of an individual is in the movie “The Postman”. The hero (Kevin Costner) is so perfect that he does not, will not, kill anyone, even if it means his own death. It becomes apparent, however, that the bad guy must be killed in order for any success to be possible. The hero’s closest supporter kills the bad guy, thereby allowing the hero to remain perfect (and we should assume the group would only follow a perfect person?). Amazing. Also in this movie is present the assertion that fiction is permissible in order to provide “dreams” for people, that whether the “dreams” are true or not doesn’t matter. Again, amazing.
In observing the processes of liberal politics, I have come to believe that some individuals periodically say and do the ridiculous things they say and do because they want to help the leader(s), and thereby the group (the Democratic Party), even if they appear (or are!) ridiculous, dishonest, ignorant, or whatever else, by doing it. So important is this type of sacrifice to the liberal agenda that Al Gore even received a Nobel Peace Prize for sacrificing his political leadership to push radical environmentalism, lies and all.
In a more recent television movie entitled “A Cinderella Story”, an interesting variant of the sacrifice theme is present. When the heroine quits her job (where her boss is also her evil step-mother), the other employees quit with her, something that would not happen in “real life”, as much as other employees might agree with a fellow employee. This seems to me to say that the group, not withstanding the contradiction that the group is composed of individuals, should also be willing to sacrifice for the individual, if that individual is sufficiently wronged, as of course “Cinderella” is.
Contributing to the transition from simple and clear to complex and difficult was the development of psychoanalysis, started by Sigmund Freud (b.1856, d. 1939). It reinforces the importance of society as opposed to the importance of individual responsibility. In much of our drama, the bad guys are given a past and/or a situation that relieves them of a lot of their responsibility for what they are doing, even if the past is revealed only through conversation. And of course, if an individual is not responsible for his failure, then he is not responsible for his success. Or vice versa. Our drama indeed tells us that the group determines (controls) our success. It was not possible to close the circle so completely when God determined success or failure, but the belief in predestination in essence did it. Spain resisted belief in predestination but still taught that as messengers of God on earth, we must save other people or fail God. We fought communism but we still have put the government (the group, both as democracy and as bureaucracy) more and more in charge of everything.
Just as Spain went from sending men to heaven who had achieved fame through action to sending men to heaven who had said only the right words, we have gone from making somebodies of men of action (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln) to making somebodies of men of words (Clinton, Gore). I worry that action remains a part of our public life only to the extent that life requires reaction.
From Action to Violence (or from Laughter and Tears to Pain)
In Spain during the period leading up to the Renaissance and during most of the Renaissance, people had many things to do: the moors to defeat, a new world to conquer, an “old world” to control, and new wealth to spend on wars and the Armada. In the case of the United States, in our formative years there was a continent to explore and settle, Indians to defeat, and gold rushes to pursue. During these periods of activity, the drama, or entertainment, was relatively relaxing, with simple plots, obvious heroes, easily won victories, and simple action, as in sword and fistfights.
During the period that follows success in settling continents and finding riches, there is less to do. There is more leisure time. The entertainment becomes more violent, physically, emotionally, and verbally. In Baroque drama, or entertainment, the violence, or the search for justice, may be made more painful by the villain or wayward person being the hero’s son, or a friend’s husband. Justice is achieved painfully, even if the “violence” is only at the emotional level. I propose that these approaches are a way to keep the excitement level high when people have comfortable, maybe even boring, lives. Our entertainment is more humane than was that of the gladiators in the Roman Coliseum, although not necessarily much different visually, because people can be killed on film and still live. The leisurely life style in the days of Rome was supported by slaves who did the work. In Spain, it was supported by servants and horses. In our case, it is supported by the machine. I would note in passing my belief that the human race abandoned slavery only when the machine made it comfortable.
Even our sports reflect this evolution from action to violence. Baseball is a slower game than football, so that one might be deceived. Baseball has action in bursts, much like a simple plot with a number of scenes in succession. It is more relaxing to watch because of the lack of excitement. Football is a more rapid game, a more violent game (not only because of the tackles but because of the risk of injury for the players), some say a more exciting game, some say a game requiring more strategic thinking (more difficult). Then there’s hockey, and even the way basketball is played nowadays.
Charlie Chaplin moved quickly and with much hat manipulation. Hopalong Cassidy galloped furiously after the villain and leaped to knock him from his horse. Little Joe Cartwright might almost, but not actually, kill a man while the emotional tension is maintained during long speeches. If he wounds a man, everyone takes it very seriously, so that many scenes have little action, containing instead emotionally charged, and slow, conversation. “The Virginian” and “The High Chaparral” had scenes lasting minutes that were nothing more, for example, than the villains deciding, with much arguing, which road to take.
It is possible for visible physical violence to actually decrease in Baroque entertainment. It can become an off-screen (off-stage) occurrence, the impact of it delivered to the audience by way of the dialog, or it can become mostly emotional and/or verbal violence. “The Virginian”, even though it had some very violent episodes, had episodes that were full of threatened but never realized violence, mixed with scenes of emotional confrontations. A horse roping scene might last a minute, while other scenes were drawn out “forever” for full emotional saturation, both overly tender and overly tense, without it being clear even as to all of the emotional factors involved.
In one episode of “The Virginian”, a girl runs away from an overly strict father. The episode is full of threatened violence, but no one is hurt, except for Trampis, who falls down some stairs and breaks a leg, and a sock on the jaw for an obnoxious ranch hand. The hero walks with his back to the girl’s father, who is holding a gun on him, threatening to shoot him, creating suspense, increasing the flow of adrenalin. All is resolved, after a fashion, with an emotional scene between the father and the daughter, with the hero playing referee. Suddenly her father, who wasn’t her father, is her father, who didn’t cause her mother’s death, who did cause her mother’s death. Suddenly, saying her father’s name seems to turn hateful force into loving inadequacy, all because she couldn’t face her own fear at deserting her mother at the time of her death. There is some logic to the initial shift when she says her father’s name, but this logic is quickly dissolved by the rest of the scene. It seems a tragedy of misunderstandings, the emotions ground out as a slow motion talking fingernail across a black board. Maybe it even foreshadowed the politically correct “principle” that perception is everything, or that all points of view are equally valid. Maybe this is a North American “tragicomedy” because there is finally reconciliation between father and daughter.
It is naïve to think that counting the number of killings is going to control “violence” on television. A senate committee investigating violence in our entertainment (especially television) failed to consult Aristotle’s definition of literature and drama, which contains strong support for saying that the adrenalin burned watching violent entertainment is not released in other more harmful ways. It was called Catharsis. They also failed to consider the possibility that maybe violence in entertainment and in the streets (gangs), and in recent years dramatically in our schools and places of work, have the same cause: a culture/society with too little action and too little clarity.
In a Baroque period, sophistication prohibits the innocence of believing in the original ideal without reservations. And since there are many philosophies, any contradictions, such as those between capitalism and Christianity, can be demonstrated in entertainment by way of humor. Many North American “sitcoms” are based to varying degrees on the failure of at least one character to understand his or her own behavior or his or her own pronouncements.
Because of our Baroque entertainment, we may sound more moral, because we’re satirizing our shortcomings, because we’re lecturing each other through the dialog of the performers, when in fact there is much doubt. Some of this doubt is about the founding ideals as well as about the society in which we are living. There was a film “Cheyenne Autumn”, which moralized about Christianity in relation to how we treated Native Americans, in which there were good and bad people on both sides. When this is the case, how do you choose sides? At least for that movie, you could still choose among the people.
There is one more step that some people take, which is the rejection of both action and violence. Action in a comfortable established society is not very necessary. Violent action is not morally acceptable. History shows how many mistakes have been made, even with ideals presumably in place. In the United States, the first noticeable group to reject both action and violence was the “beatniks”, soon followed by the “hippies”. They didn’t work in the rat race, they practiced love and peace. They didn’t accumulate money, they collected converts. They sometimes used “mind expanding” drugs to further escape what they saw as the errors of the society, maybe to become one with God. The hippies purposely brought violence down on themselves by disruptive behavior, while dressing as Native Americans or as Christ.
Spain’s mystics were generally main stream, as were her monasteries and nunneries, some cloistured. But disruptive in nature were the hermits, who, after moving to the forest, flogged themselves; and the “alumbrados” and the “quietistas”, who followed the teachings of Miguel de Molinos. He taught that a man united with God need not even fear hell. He died in prison in 1696.
From Freedom to Force (or from Opportunity to Need)
The principal goal of the constitutional republic, managed by elected representatives, the “founding fathers” formed as the United States of America was freedom, rather than “democracy” per se. The Declaration of Independence described the ideal of freedom as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” However, in today’s rhetoric not only our form of government but also our freedoms and our economic successes have all come to be “democracy”. Occasionally someone mentions that we are also a “capitalist” nation. Capitalism is the only economic system that is possible if freedom is the goal. Without going into the debates around capitalism, for this discourse I will observe that we have evolved even further from “capitalism” than we have from “constitutional republic”. Because of the bad name people who oppose it have given to “capitalism”, many people prefer the term “free market economy” when discussing economic issues.
The important thing, I believe, is to realize that the ability to “vote” with money is at least as important as the ability to vote for legislators (representatives) and presidents. The closer the economy is to a “free market economy”, the more voting power the people (producers and consumers) have when deciding what to do with their money. If the ability to choose the next tyrant is the only vote you have, then you have very little power. In addition to voting with ballots, a free people should be able to vote with dollars too. For one quick example, consider Ralph Nader. He lobbied for a change in the law to cause cars to be produced the way HE wanted them produced, with seat belts. In an ideal world, he would have been forced (by reality as well as by other people refusing to let him misuse law), to use private money to either buy or create his own auto company and find out, by competition, how many people preferred having seat belts. I believe in using my seat belt: the statistics are clear that seat belts save lives. But Ralph Nader should have been told to put his money, not other people’s (unless they voluntarily invested in his company), where his mouth was.
“Freedom” has been redefined since the Declaration of Independence to mean not only freedom from force, both the force of government and the force (theft, murder) of other citizens, but also freedom from hunger. If one person (adult) is “free” to not work and yet will still be fed, then another person is providing his/her food. When this is accomplished by taxation, force is being used to transfer food (money) from one person to another. Taxation is backed up by force, even though we talk about our taxes being “voluntary”. Most of us prefer to not be in court, let alone in prison. But when you will receive your food for “free” if only you “need” it, then “need” has a market value! And, as they say, what you pay for, you will get.
When people boast about the success of the United States of America, there is not enough emphasis on the importance of having a new continent to explore, settle and develop for the opportunities that were a keystone of the “American dream”. To a great extent “opportunity” is diminished by there being no more open land to homestead and there being more and more people with whom it is necessary to compete. These realities make other restrictions on the freedom to act, such as complicated tax and building codes, even more destructive to individual initiative.
There is not enough emphasis, either, on how many other American countries imitated our pursuit of “democracy”, with constitutions and representative assemblies, when Spain and Brazil lost their control of Mexico and Central and South America. The road to success was more difficult for Latin America, however, because of the economic structures they inherited, and because they controlled smaller areas of territory. Brazil is the largest, and slowly gains strength, but its interior is dominated by rain forest, a difficult environment to conquer. There were other factors in what has become history for Latin America (organized Indian civilizations, lack of national education systems), but as these countries, and later as the rest of the world, came to see the results of our success as a big bully, some of them came to prefer strategies that might bring us down.
From Believing to Pretending (or from Education to Indoctrination)
Even though rambling and long, the novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha”, is a window into Spain as she evolved into her Baroque self. My professors of Spanish Literature taught that if Don Quijote had been born in the Middle Ages, he would have been a saint; if he had been born in the Renaissance, he would have been a hero; but having been born later, he was a crazy man. He fought windmills, believing them to be giants. He fought sheep, thinking he was ousting an army of moors. He believed he had found the helmet of Mambruno, which would make him invisible. At an inn, the guests choose sides and a miniature war is fought over whether it is the helmet of Mambruno or a barber’s basin.
Don Quijote’s squire, Sancho Panza, saw reality more clearly. He knew the windmills weren’t giants, but he believed in supporting his knight. He knew the sheep weren’t moors, but he knew the moors were a problem. He knew the helmet of Mambruno was a barber’s basin. He saw his master being continually battered by reality.
What made Don Quijote “crazy” enough to try to be a knight errant? The books of chivalry, the books about the knight errants that were popular in the Renaissance. The knight errants followed the ideals of the saints of the middle ages, celibate, fighting evil and protecting ladies. I think the equivalent would be a man in our society today deciding to strap on guns, as we see in our “westerns”, and trying to right wrongs by challenging other men to gun fights in the streets. Would not such a man be considered crazy? Don’t we see, in retrospect, the goal of World War I to fight a war to end all wars as being a candidate for incredulity? And don’t we believe that our ideal of helping other nations to form democratic unions is fraught with many difficulties, now that all nations have pretty much made their choices, or had them made for them, and imitation of our form of government (especially in Latin America) is history?
When disagreements about what is “ideal” and what is “real” increase, and when problems that people would like to see solved are not, producers of all forms of art structure their works to make their point of view more obvious. If only people would agree with me, or understand my ideals, these problems could be solved. Shock treatment, using profanity and blasphemy to attack religion, for example, may be used by some artists, but more often Baroque artists produce art and drama containing obvious messages, sometimes becoming preachy. Even North American music contains the “message” songs of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, and others. The preaching and/or content of strong messages correspond to the Baroque principles of “aiming at one principal idea” and “a single motive dominates strongly”. They also correspond to the Baroque belief in greater realism, or of being more “realistic”, as opposed to the “innocence” of believing in the previous ideals that some will say have failed.
That the “Man from la Mancha” was popular a few years back in the United States is significant. The theme song sums it up pretty well. The ideals are: facing hell for heavenly causes, righting wrongs, dreaming dreams, reaching the stars, and beating foes. BUT, the wrongs are unrightable, the dreams impossible, the stars unreachable, the foes unbeatable!!
At the end of “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha”, Don Quijote is dying, and Sancho begs him to get well so they can go be hermits. Spain could no longer maintain the ideal of the knight errant (active Christianity) except with the passive life of the hermit (mysticism). We are trying to maintain the ideal of equal opportunity (action required by the individual) with welfare and handouts (passive role for the individual).
It is interesting that the play “Man from La Mancha” was a musical, because the lyrics of songs by Simon and Garfunkle reflect similar disillusionment. The songs of Simon and Garfunkle contain phrases such as “my fantasy becomes reality”, “I don’t know what is real”, and “So I continue to continue to pretend”. And while the interpretation of poetry sung can be taken too far, they even say, “I’m blinded by the light of God and truth and right and I wander in the night without direction…” The songs of Simon and Garfunkle are also laced with two other themes of a leisure culture with Baroque tastes: time and death. Life is good, and they (we) lament its passing.
I have already mentioned the statement made in the movie “The Postman” that it is not important whether “dreams” are true or real. The argument was that the importance of there being “dreams” overcame any requirement for truth. While you can spend hours discussing the problems with one man’s truth being another man’s lie, while it is very difficult, in other words, to define “indoctrination”, or to agree on what the content should be for “education”; to abandon in real life what is obvious reality, to in essence reject one of the principal foundations of civilization--the scientific method-- as has been done in declaring a “consensus” for “global warming”, for example, is to destroy knowledge. Rejecting the scientific method reduces, in the long run, the possibility for consensus on many levels in many ways. One of our biggest problems at this point is that those in control of our public education system do not believe in education. They believe in indoctrination into their point of view.
I was born in the 1940’s to parents traumatized by the Great Depression. I believe in reality, physical reality. I believe in science, meaning the scientific method, but not in majority votes, for determining reality. It is true that science does not provide the morality by which we should use it, but to substitute magic for science, to support falsehoods over truth in the name of “dreams” is to surrender to ignorance and indoctrination.
I used the phrase “substitute magic for science” because in addition to “consensus science”, there has been an increase in the use of “magic” as a major component of our entertainment. We may have laughed at some of McGiver’s feats, wondering if they could really work as portrayed, but at least the structure of this television series supported the concept of the power of science to solve problems. My professors of Spanish Literature taught that magic was the means by which people maintained a sense of power or control during the Middle Ages. If you abandon science, what else is there?
Superheroes are a fascinating fiction in light of mankind’s desire for control or power. The super powers of Superman and Batman pale in comparison with those of more recent superheroes, like the Terminator and the Mutants. Super powers can control the physical world like magic.
Defining “magic” is difficult for several reasons. For one thing, fiction is fiction. For another, toasters and elevators may seem like “magic” to people who don’t know how they work. Further, how does “magic” relate to ghosts and vampires, angels and religion, and, for the purposes of this discussion, to science fiction? Science fiction permits other worlds with all kinds of possibilities for “magic” as well as for “science”. The ignoring of certain realities was commonplace in the Star Trek series, and some of it motivated by reasons other than whatever you might call possible future technologies. (My understanding is that they invented the “transporter” [“Beam me up, Scotty”] because they did not want to have to work plots around the time necessary for people to travel back and forth between the Enterprise and the planets it encountered.) It is possible to name many science fiction novels and movies which ignore certain realities of our physical world as we know it and which also propose, and/or continue already proposed, powerful future technologies for travel in space and time: Star Wars, The Terminator series, Dune, and so forth. You can go back to time travel by H. G. Wells (The Time Machine, 1895) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit was copyrighted in 1937, the trilogy, at least the paperback version, in 1965.) for the roots of science fiction and for “magic” to be a component of an imagined world.
The Star Trek television series began with adventure and science fiction, containing only generalized ideals such as “be good to your fellow man”. It became, however, a “message” series, with every show containing a parallel to the “real” world. There were miners being discriminated against, people one half black and one half white persecuting people with the opposite half the other color, hippie-like sit-downers, and chanters misled by crazy, traitorous leaders.
In addition to surviving the preachy messages of a Baroque culture, you must be vigilant in order to spot the science fiction writer who does not believe in science, or in mankind as a scientist. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Author, Arthur C. Clarke) is a dramatic example of this. The space ships and music are good, but the messages of the film are negative when it comes to man and his abilities. Apes begin to produce tools only after contact with a mysterious monolith, the appearance of which is accompanied by religious organ music. Men are able to make a (self-aware!) computer only after contact again with the mysterious monolith. The author of this movie said, in an interview of him that I saw years ago, that he was giving us a new concept. I sarcastically ask, is it that God is replaced by “monolith accompanied by religious organ music”? (His theme may have been remolded into another proposal, that contact by extraterrestrials explains man’s achievements, or at least the beginning of them.) In “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the self-aware computer, Hal, reacts with total fear to being disconnected or “death”, the author counting, I believe, on the fears of the viewer to identify emotionally with the event. To be fair, it is an extremely common assumption among science fiction writers, that self-aware computers (robots) will have emotions, in spite of programming to the contrary. Towards the end of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” there is an infinity trip, after we can hear a heart beating. Is this “life after death” at the “heart” of the universe?
Even though I believe strongly in recognizing physical reality, indeed in “truth” as I would define it :>), my intent in this section is not to criticize the genre of “science fiction” itself or to say that “magic” is at all times suspect. I have been most entertained by the television shows and movies I’m naming (except for “2001: A Space Odyssey” and decadent Star Trek episodes), having seen many of them multiple times. The Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling (first one copyrighted in 1997), and the movies made based upon them, have been very enjoyable, portraying, in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way, the poor job adults do of educating their children. But Harry presumably lives “now” and he also carries a wand and has a cloak that makes him invisible! In the Harry Potter movies, “magic” as exercised by his teachers, himself and his friends and enemies, is an explicit part of the plot(s).
I have not watched many of the recent television shows containing vampire slayers and witches, and therefore I am unable to comment on them in detail. Based upon “promos” I have seen for them, however, I would guess that “magic” is relatively explicit in most, if not all, of them. It is also obvious, in 2008, that the themes of “magic”, “witches”, “vampires” and “ghosts” are being used more and more frequently. A recent (2008) episode of “The Librarian” television series, which uses magical abilities for its plots, contained a vampire, even though the presumed purpose of the hero is to preserve knowledge and valuable artifacts.
I noticed recently that a reprise of Walt Disney’s “live action films” was entitled “The Age of Believing”. Whether in using the word “believing” they mean more the innocence of idealism or the use of “flubber” to fly, I don’t know, not having seen it. But Walt Disney is yet another variation on the mixture of the “real” and the “unreal”, and historically reflects a more “innocent” time.
Magic and false “dreams” may work in motion pictures, but in the real (physical) world they will fail, even more badly than the ideals they reject! Given how humankind functions in the real world, we expect too much of our ideals, we expect too much of science. Even though it has given us planes so that we may fly, cars that we may travel in a 24/7 world, computers that we may search for anything and everything, and telephones, radios, televisions and satellites that we may communicate with everyone, are we rejecting it because it cannot make us total masters of the physical world? Science cannot make us honest or give us eternal life. Likewise, democracy cannot make us honest or give us eternal life. It takes more than a majority vote to get to heaven! I have feared for some time that we are indoctrinating and legislating ourselves into the next Dark Ages, where, rather than the monks transcribing the books to maintain knowledge that most people didn’t know, engineers will maintain a technology that most people won’t be able to use beyond its umbilical cord connection (the Internet controlled) with their rulers and entertainers.
Applying my own sense of realism to my quest to understand what our entertainment tells us about ourselves, I have decided it is impossible to stop this evolutionary process in which a nation or a society, once developed, goes down under its own contradictions and mistakes. It appears to be a natural cycle, like the up and down cycles of the economy (or parts of the economy), which cannot be stopped. Even though some men (and women) are scientists, other men (and women) are conceited and ignorant enough to believe that they should and can (!) rule “the world”, causing them to prefer indoctrination, and by extension, magic. Of course they would destroy science, even while living with plastic counter tops and disposable diapers, because knowledge makes men (and women) independent and free OF THEM.
FOOTNOTE:
Some of you may be yelling at me, by now, that I have failed to mention the Spanish Inquisition. The Encyclopedia Britannica in 1974, Micropaedia, V, states that the Inquisition was a “papal judicial institution” which had three phases: the medieval, the Roman, and the Spanish. The Spanish phase is the best known. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that in Spain it was established by the Pope in the latter part of the 15th century at the request of los Reyes Católicos to combat Jews and Muslims, and also the “alumbrados”, as well as witchcraft and sorcery. Some of you might also say that the United States has escaped this instrument of belief control.
I remind you first that in order to understand the United States for this discussion, you must look at the political beliefs and institutions. Spain’s unity was religious, ours is political. And then the investigating committees of the United States House and Senate emerge as the equivalent of the Inquisition, destroying political careers and economic fortunes rather than putting people to death. The “McCarthy Era” (Joseph McCarthy was first elected to the U. S. House in 1948.) is the most famous phase of these committees, when he fought communism. The name of the House Un-American Activities Committee was changed to Internal Security Committee in the 1970’s. In more recent times, the oil executives have been brought before investigating committees, reflecting the shift to more liberal agendas.